It's almost impossible to overstate just how influential Sunn O))) has been in the last 10 years. Their two most recent albums, The Black One from 2005 and this year's Monoliths and Dimensions, are each an apex of sorts--the first as the culmination of the band's droning doom/black metal, the second as a masterwork of intense and unexpected majesty. As Eric Dawson wrote in his profile of the band: "On Monoliths and Dimensions, Sunn O))) expanded their sonic palette to include a Viennese women's choir, avant-garde trombonist Stewart Dempster, and arrangements by composer Eyvind Kang. Perhaps the most unusual contribution comes from Sun Ra and John Coltrane sideman Julian Priester, who can be heard to most striking effect on the 16-minute album closer "Alice," a song dedicated to Alice Coltrane. That track alone seems to have elicited more purple prose from critics and bloggers than any single Sunn O))) album, and if you hear it you'll understand why. Resembling modern composition more than metal, the track winds down with a duet between Priestley's trombone and a harpist in a finale so improbably lovely it must have surprised even Anderson and O'Malley. Though the doom duo's drones are present throughout the album, grounding it in their by now familiar sound, it could be they've reached some sort of pinnacle with the Sunn O))) brand, and one can only wonder where they'll go from here."
Then there's the Southern Lord label run by Anderson and O'Malley, which has provided exposure for Japanese fuzz rockers Boris, helped (for better or for worse, depending on your perspective) create a commercial profile for American black metal, and pretty much invented the record-nerd/metalhead boutique-label business model.
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